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Religious Mediatization and Modernity in Latin America

© 2008 Rolando Perez

The urbanization process of many Latin American countries has brought about

not only an increase in religious groups, but also the presence of diverse religious

expressions. These new religious expressions are markedly changing the urban cultural

landscape, broadening understanding of the urban (beyond just as a category for

describing the city) as a particular sensitivity and communicative experience which

revolves around a shared desire to be modern. The urban religious field is undergoing a

series of cultural changes and becoming a mediation space for intercultural negotiation

and exchange, and for the construction of new socialization practices.

The close of the twentieth century witnessed radical changes which include the

rise, crises, and re-articulations of Christian-based communities inspired by Liberation

Theology, the rapid expansion of evangelical Protestantism, the growth of the Catholic

Charismatic movement, the revival and re-Africanization of African-based religions, and

the emergence among the urban middle classes of ‘New Age’ religions. These processes

demonstrate that the religious field in Latin America has become highly pluralistic

Moreover, despite claims of modernization and secularization, these processes point to

the enduring role of religion in public life (Dominguez, 2008).

In this context, mass media has become a strategic space regarding insertion of

religious groups into the spiritual marketplace. This paper intends to articulate the social

and cultural implications of the process of modernity in Latin America, as well as the

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characteristics of religious mediatization and its implications on the configuration of

identities and the process of socialization.

Appropriation of Modernity in Latin America

The emergence of modernity in Latin America is expressed, in part, in the process

of urbanization resulting from a wave of rural-urban migrations in the 1980s and 1990s.

Rural people moved to cities yearning to enjoy the ‘miracle of modern life.’ The cultural

and social face of Latin American cities experienced huge cultural changes marked by the

encounter between traditional and modern cultural logics.

In the context of rural-urban migration and the growing poverty generated by the

debt crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American countries experienced the

growth of urban popular cultures in which pre-modern practices and traditions of mutual

assistance, solidarity and reciprocity were re-functionalized in the urban context.

Specifically, many migrants incorporated themselves into urban social groups, In

religious groups they found recognition with the cultural values of their places of origin,

generally of provincial or rural extraction.

Carlos Franco, a social researcher from Peru, has identified a series of

characteristics that make us believe that in the migratory process there occurs an

appropriation of new cultural values. The claim for making migration the founding

process of ‘the other modernity’ has been based up to now on the following criteria: a)

the rupture of rural society; b) the liberation of rural families from the determinism of

tradition; c) the construction of a new sense of space and time; d) the change of value

orientations, patterns of conduct, and the cultural styles of its protagonists; and e) the

capacity to produce or co-produce the processes of urbanization (Franco, 1991). In this

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sense, the Latin American process of modernity is a complex process of adaptations and

appropriations to new conditions that have generated the “[creation of] spaces for other

modernities too(sic) in which emancipation from hunger and oppression go hand in hand

with an affirmation of plurality, or dialogue between the traditions and modernities which

constitute Latin America’s heterogeneity” (Schelling, 2000).

In the same way, analyzing the Latin American migration process, German Rey

observes that “while vast migrations from the countryside to the cities have taken place,

contrasts coexist in the same physical space: pre-modernity and modernity, traditional

societies and groups operating with global logics, large social groups that live immersed

in their oral cultures and are challenged by audiovisual culture and groups that are

actively connected to the new technologies and consumer practice” (Rey, 2004.

García-Canclini, one of the influential scholars in this field, contends that in order

to understand the particular process that modernity has produced in Latin America it is

important to rethink our conceptual logics on culture and social interactions. He writes,

“… our understanding of modernity in Latin America has changed from

an evolutionist model of social improvement through urbanization,

industrialization and secularization, to a postmodernist conception based

on the heterogeneity of development in the region… Today we conceive

of Latin America as more complex articulation of traditions and

modernities (diverse and unequal), a heterogeneous continent of countries

in each of which coexist multiple logics of development. Because of this

heterogeneity, as new way of looking at society, culture and development

are needed” (García-Canclini, 1990).

From this understanding about the cultural and social dynamic that the process of

modernity has produced in Latin America, García-Canclini worked out the notion of

hybridization of culture. He prefers this term to others such as syncretism and mestizaje,

because the former “includes diverse intercultural mixtures– not only the racial ones to

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which mestizaje tends to be limited– and because it permits the inclusion of the modern

forms of hybridization better than does syncretism” (Ibid, pg.11).

His studies aim to understand under what conditions and in what direction the

processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization develop, as well as the

hybridization of traditional heritages. He observed that in many Latin American countries

both happen de-territorialization processes and many re-territorializations happen, and–

like terrorist movements– they have the effect of reinforcing authoritarianism, dogmatism

and fundamentalism which are obstacles to democratic reconstruction and the resolutions

of the basic problems of the inhabitants.

It confirms the tendency that theorists of modern globalization have observed:

communication industries and media technologies have not eliminated the localized

character of appropriation, but rather they have created a new kind of symbolic axis of

globalized diffusion and localized appropriation (Thompson, 1995). It is true that modern

globalization, as John Tomlinson mentions, has generated the phenomenon of ‘de-

territorialization’, whereby the traditional, ‘natural’ relationship between a given culture

and a given place gradually dissolves. However, another kind of social and cultural

process occurs in the local landscape: re-territorialization, whereby people attach

themselves socially and emotionally to the transformed locality and the new social

networks that have become part of it (Tomlinson, 2003).

Anthony Giddens observes two reciprocal processes in globalization, namely dis-

embedding1 and re-embedding. For Giddens modernity breaks with tradition by

detaching social processes from their tradition-bound, geographically defined social

1 ‘Disembedding’ means – for Anthony Giddens – “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts

of interaction and restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”

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context (Giddens, 2003). From this point of view modern cultural globalization does not

mean devaluation of locality or local territory. For our thesis it is important to note that

the ways in which locality is produced are within the context of global technological

communications and the emergence of networks mediated by the media. This assessment

does not imply the denial of the presence of powerful forces that tend to generate

enormous barriers to communication and ‘non-democratic’ culture. However, it is

important to recognize that in the local context, more complex processes are occurring

than those proposed by the cultural imperialism paradigm.

Anther important discussion in the Latin American context is related to the postmodernity

culture. In this aspect, Latin American scholars (Martin-Barbero, 1993; Parker, 1996:

Garcia Cancilini, 1995; Brunner, 1995; Quijano, 1995) agree that the engagement with

postmodernism in Latin America that is so prominent in its Anglo-European

manifestations; it concerns, rather, the complexity of Latin America’s own “uneven

modernity” and the new developments of its hybrid (pre and post) modern cultures. Jose

Joaquin Brunner argues that postmodernism is, in effect, the specific form modernity

takes in Latin America.

Parker (1996), a Chilean sociologist of religion, argues that far from losing their

traditionally religious culture, the dispossessed and marginalized in contemporary Latin

America operate from a different logic that permits them to function simultaneously as

modern people and believers in a profound religious, albeit syncretic worldview.

As part of his postmodern argument about hybrid cultures and oblique powers,

Nestor Garcia Canclini accounts that “we [Latin Americans] would be living in

postmodernity, not exactly because we have superseded modernity, but due to the fact

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that postmodern problematic has become pervasive. In other words, heterogeneity,

pluralism, fragmentation, hybridism have come to stay and displaced the former concern

of modernity with homogenization and an unilinear overcoming of the past, related to the

traditional experience and practices. (Garcia-Canclini, 1995)

In fact, it reflects an cultural scenario where is possible to observe a superposition

and intertwinement of different traditions, including modern traditions, that takes place in

these processes of “disembeddings” and “re-embedings.”

Role of Media

Latin American theorists of modernity (Martin-Barbero, 2000;Ortiz, 1988; Rey,

2004; Monsivais, 1988; García-Canclini, 2005; Brunner, 1992) agree that media has

played a major role in the development of an internal market and consolidation of a

national identity, as well as in the process of appropriation of new cultural discourses and

practices.

German Rey mentions some reasons to understand the role of media in the Latin

American cultural dynamic. “First, Communication has been important in the processes

that have modernized our countries, in the connection[s] that exist between new

technologies and daily life, in the entry of local societies into global economy and in the

spread of a world culture. Second, the media have play[ed] a decisive role in establishing

the identity of Latin American societies and of very specific sectors of the population.

Nestor García-Canclini accounts that radio and cinema helped organize the narrative of

identity and civic sense. Third, there is a long tradition of combining images, culture and

religiosity that runs through the whole of Latin American history, through its aesthetics

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and its sensibilities, as well as through its ways of life, belief, systems and expectations

for the future” (Rey, 2004). In post-revolutionary Mexico for example, radio and cinema

represent ‘the people’ as a nation by making use of and amalgamating elements from

cultures of different regions. In Brazil, the telenovela and the radio have been

fundamental in creating the imagined community of nation (Schelling, 2000).

Jose Joaquin Brunner accounts that “today the national and the popular are in the

public plaza but also in the market, in rural traditions but also in transitory urban styles,

in the mass media, and in educational institutions, in global communications and in the

flows that traverse them, and so on” (Brunner, 1992). In this way, the culture of mass

consumption has generated the construction of new cultural memories, which have in

turn created new notions of time and rhythms of life as well as new icons, symbols, etc.

Modernity, in this sense, has suddenly redefined space and time, causing deep changes in

the configuration of cultural territories.

Modern communication technologies and cultural industries facilitated the

creative process. As García-Canclini observes: “technologies of reproduction allow

everyone to equip their home with a repertoire of discs and cassettes that combine high

culture with the popular, including those who have already synthesized many sources in

the production of their works…” (1989). In this sense, García-Canclini observes that

“the trans-nationalization of culture brought about by communication technologies, their

reach, and their efficacy are better appreciated as part of the recomposition of urban

cultures, along with the migrations and tourism that soften national borders and redefine

the concepts of nation, people, and identity” (García-Canclini, 1995).

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This media dynamic confirms that:

“the Latin American masses are becoming incorporated into modernity not

by way of illustrated projects but by way of other projects in which urban

masses and cultural industries are allied. The Latin American urban

masses are elaborating a secondary mode, a grammatical oral mode not

through the syntax of the written word, but through audio-visual syntax.

Secondary orality becomes then the osmosis between memories— long

memories of life and tales— and devices of new audio-visual narratives,

between archaic narrative and postmodern devices” (Martin-Barbero,

1992).

Cultural Matrices of Mediatization

In the Latin American context, the relationship between mediation and

mediatization implicates that culture became a fundamental factor in understanding the

interplay between the productions, circulation and consumption of the cultural discourses

and practices. In this sense, German Rey points out that “culture– or rather, cultures–

have increased their presence, both socially and conceptually, in Latin America. Socially,

this has come about through phenomena such as multiculturality, the processes of

hybridization and mestizaje, and the sociocultural movements that daily increase their

social and political prominence or through the convergence of widely diverse cultures

that make up dense and complex intercultural realities in the continent” (Rey, 2004).

For this social and political dynamic that Latin Americans have undergone, it is

impossible to disconnect our understanding of mediatization from other cultural, social

and political mediation processes. For this reason, the history of mass media is connected

to the perspective of cultural processes as articulators of the communication practices–

hegemonic and subaltern– of social movements. This connection allows us to recognize

not only the multiculturality of cultural practices but also the form of institutional

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constructions and realities of daily life, as well as the subjectivity of the social actors and

the multiplicity of loyalties that are operating simultaneously.

This perspective contrasts with that of the ‘mediacentricism’ approach for

considering mediatization beyond the media product itself. “This abdication is less the

result of an industrial reconversion of the media that puts the communication functions

of the media in second place behind economic and industrial considerations and is more

influenced by social movements making visible the mediations” (Martin-Barbero, 1993).

As a hypothesis to bring together and structure converging areas of theoretical

interpretation, Martin-Barbero proposes an analysis of three places of mediation:

The first place is the daily life of the family, due to the fact that, for the great

majority, family viewing is the prime context for recognition of sociocultural identity.

Martin-Barbero believes that it is not possible to understand the specific way that the

media, especially television, appeals to the family, without analyzing the daily life of the

family as the social context of a fundamental appeal to the popular sectors.

The second place of mediation, social temporality, refers to the developing of

communicational processes taking into account the relationship between the different

tempos of development within the plurality of cultural matrices. Martin-Barbero

considers that when we observe the time of the daily life it is important to consider the

routines and rituals of the socialization process.

The third place of mediation, cultural competence, implies a connection between

the mediation process and the cultural matrices from which people produce and consume

messages. Martin-Barbero critiques the culturalist tendency that situates the

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communicational projects outside of the social meaning of cultural differences. From this

perspective, media is a matter of culture and mediatization.

This approach is coincident with the focus of contemporary media studies which

proposes that mediatization cannot be simply instrumental, but that we must recognize

the general integration of the media into other social spaces (Hoover, 2008).

In the same way, Hjarvard proposes mediatization is about the long-term process

of changing social institutions and modes of interactions in culture and society due to the

growing importance of media in all strands of society. Mediatization is the process of

social change that to some extent subsumes other social or cultural fields into the logic of

the media.

Implications of Religious Mediatization

Media appropriations into religious communities

During the first step of modern urbanization, one of the community mediation

spaces where urban people construed their new socialization experience was religious

communities and networks which became a doorway to modern urban socialization. For

instance, evangelical churches often allowed urban people to appropriate modernity

without abandoning essential elements of their traditional culture, consequently avoiding

the traumatic shocks generated by the forces of modernity. In this context, many

congregations became mediating spaces that have helped to create the appropriate

conditions for a kind of process of cultural re-territorialization.

It is interesting to observe the appropriation of mass media culture into religious

rituals, such as mass liturgies and festivals, where it is possible to observe the

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appropriation of discourses that do not necessarily correspond to the traditional sacred

world. For instance, in the case of Peruvian evangelical churches it has become

symbolically important for the physical structure of modern temples to demonstrate

significant appropriations of television’s structural aesthetic. Even more, many churches

have found that cinemas in Latin America are quite suited to holding church services. In

the church itself, the decor, the placing of electronic equipment and the use of electronic

musical instruments, are not only direct adaptations of modern technology, but also are

symbolic appropriations from the codes of mass culture.

Furthermore, solemn services, formal ceremony and circumspect preachers have

been replaced by the pastor-entertainer, high-volume voices, applause, and rhythmic

chanting. The hymnals and choral books have been displaced by the overhead projector

which displays the text on a large screen within the church.

On the other hand, many of these congregations have developed socialization

spaces such as music festivals, sport competitions and family retreats after Sunday

services or on holidays. These events have a close connection with rural social and

cultural rituals, and they become mediating factors that permit migrants to be

incorporated less traumatically, and without cultural ruptures, into the urban world. In

this sense, the social forms of urban integration are associated with the style of the

society of origin. They are connected to new communication networks characterized by

strategies of empowerment, negotiation and resistance. In this way, the incorporation of

the traditional world– its musical culture, religious rituals, and ancestral customs– into

the urban world means “a transformation of perception, a recasting of [their] spatial and

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temporal senses… [In this case] Modernity is accompanied by a re-subjectivization in a

reflexive form” (Scott & Urry, 1994).

It is clear that the symbolic elements that sustain religious ritual are those that

make the encounter with the urban world a continuation of traditional cultural

experiences. It is interesting, for example, how collective memory– learned and lived

through oral tradition– and the memory coming from mass culture and contemporary

industrial culture, coexist in this new process of urban socialization.

But this phenomenon speaks of a new logic of socialization inside religious

groups, which is expressed by the wishes, hopes, and sensibilities of a social sector that is

no longer just a consumer, but also a producer of symbolic goods. Deterritorialized by

modernity and globalization, people attempt to re-establish a new cultural home wherever

they go (García-Canclini, 2005). These cultural ambitions and activities comprise the

process of reterritorialization. Fusing their traditions with new cultural resources in the

new territory, immigrant groups create new codes and communicational systems.

These communities that work together to maintain their traditional ethnic or

cultural identities and lifestyles constitute a set of hybrid cultures (Lull, 1995). This

experience is marked by cultural negotiations, social empowering, new ways of

socialization, new senses of belonging, and the re-construction of their own cultural

identity. In this case, it is easy to observe a kind of mediatization insofar as these

religious practices assume the form and logic of media, and are influenced by media

environment (Hjarvard, 2007).

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Media Rituals and Re-signification of Religious Practice

García-Canclini contends that to understand the essential relations of modernity

with the past requires an examination of the operations of cultural ritualization. In order

for traditions today to serve to legitimize those who constructed or appropriated them,

they must be staged. “In our America, where it is only within the last few years– and not

in all countries– that the majority of the population has become literate, it is not

surprising that culture has been predominantly visual… The practice and objects of value

to be cultured implies knowing that repertory of symbolic goods and intervening

correctly in the rituals that produce it. For that reason the notion of collection and ritual

are key to deconstructing the links between culture and power” (García-Canclini, 2005).

Analyzing the mediatized religious rituals in Mexico, Rossana Reguillo considers

that media, especially television “… has been converted into the new space of belief

management. The mediatization of events, far from dimming them, gives them credibility

through the means of the transparency of the image. Through the camera lens, the citizen-

spectator is converted into a witness and co-participant in the miracle. Television

democratizes; there isn’t any more predestination: everyone is “elected.” It displaces the

knowledge of experts and valorizes the voice of the layperson” (Reguillo 2004).

Another interesting case relates to traditional Catholic practices. For example,

rural Andean populations, who have moved to urban cities as part of a huge migration

process in Peru, continue reproducing their traditional religious rituals. The veneration of

these kinds of religious icons in the modern urban context not only has failed to disappear

but has seen increasing numbers of believers and pilgrims. Nowadays the veneration of

“the Lord of Miracles” in Peru or “the Virgin of Guadalupe” in Mexico have become

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important mass religious practices and they constitute an important part of the cultural

identity construction. However, this kind of ritual is given new meaning by the new

elements that modernity culture provides, generating hybridization in the religious

identity of believers. According to a survey on cultural consumption, people who live in

Lima more frequently attend traditional (folkloric) or religious festivals rather than other

cultural events such as art exhibits, galleries, theatrical plays, ballet performances, etc.

These massive religious rituals go beyond even national borders. For example, the Lord

of Miracles procession and the ritual celebration organized by Mexicans in honor of the

Guadalupe Virgin is celebrated even in important cities of the United States.

Here the religious movement has become interpretative communities where

meanings are elaborated and integrated through dynamic processes of social interaction.

In addition, religious experience is connected to a certain moral rationality where ethical

traditional values are re-signified but not eliminated.

In this case religious modernity implies logic of rationality, in which different

areas of life and action have not become separated and a traditional mythic worldview is

not dissolved. It entails more than just the destruction of a mythic worldview and the

breakdown of the ontological-teleological worldview, reaching even a transformation and

re-signification of ethics (Browning & Fiorenza, 1992).

Brazil is a special case in Latin America. Here it is possible to observe clearly

diverse forms of the religious hybridization. In many Brazilian cities one can find the

coexistence of different religious and spiritual expressions such as New Age, Candomblé,

Santería, Spiritism, Brazil’s Father Rossi with his CDs, the Merchants of Prosperity

Theology, Islam, Buddhism and other Eastern religions, Mother Angelica, Pare de Sofrir

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(Stop Suffering) with the Igreja Universal, and Spiritual Mapping for Spiritual Warfare.

Hence, today it is common to find people in urban Latin America who simultaneously

consume the mediatized religious spectacles offered by the mega-churches, use amulets

or crystals derived from New Age spirituality, seek alternative healing from traditional

healers, and consult with Spiritists for orientation in cases of personal crisis (Smith,

2004).

First, these cases reveal, as Reguillo accounts, that the contemporary mediated

rituals serve to illustrate the centrality of media, especially television, as producers and

articulators of beliefs, especially in a context where fear has been an instrument of

control and oppression. The city is today inhabited by multiple figures that would mean

nothing if they were not nourished by discomfort, misfortune, and senselessness.

Hence, media play a key mediation role in making this discomfort, this

misfortune, this sense of loss audible and visible, beyond their dimensions as spectacle.

In this sense, Reguillo believes that media, especially television, functions as an

important mediator of urban miracles.

Second, it reflects that popular religiosity, never absorbed by the institutional

church, is precisely what enables Latin American culture to respond so differently to the

abstract universalism of modern functionalism rationality. Popular culture is a form of

resistance, and popular religiosity is one of the major cultural resources that helps Latin

America to resist the instrumental rationality of modernity (Martin-Barbero,1997).

In this case, collective sentiments and solidarities are reinforced and re-actualized

by the media. In other words, mediatized ritual has become a key mechanism through

which beliefs and spiritual world-views are legitimized (Couldry, 2004).

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At this point, it is important to mention that Latin American popular religiosity

has been resignified by contemporary religious mediatization, constituting itself as an

important source of re-enchantment of pre-modern traditions in the modern world, while

at the same time this religious movement has became a source of identity and meaning

for modern self-reflective individuals. Here, it is possible to observe, what Stewart

Hoover (2008) observes, that mediatization of religion is rooted in the articulation of a

range of the sensibilities, contexts, and audiences that make up the complex “glocal”

cultural landscape of today.

Third, this phenomenon tells of a cultural encounter between two oral cultural

expressions: a primary orality, that of interpersonal communication, and another of mass

media narration, identified by Walter Ong (1982) as a “secondary orality.” This

appropriation process of mass modern culture by evangelical religious communities has

generated a new space that permits the coexistence of the traditional and the modern.

Fourth, the interaction between the technological rationality and symbolic codes

of audio-visual culture gives a face-lift to religious experience in the urban world. It

moves the faith communities between inner communication networks and their

interconnection with a broader network in the mass mediatized world. For this reason,

migrants found in urban evangelical communities the appropriate place to resist and

negotiate with the social and cultural forces of modernity.

This encounter between religious practices and the cultural offers of modernity

speaks of a re-enactment of traditional rituals in new contexts, scenarios and spaces as

well as in other communicative dimensions where the sacred is re-signified. It is very

important to observe that this cultural process is not as much a mechanical reproduction

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as a culturally negotiated appropriation. For example, one must understand urban

religious festivities as a way of living a particular spiritual experience, but also as a way

of experiencing new collective sensibilities and of liberating processes of socialization.

In this sense, media, says Martin-Barbero, should not be considered just in terms

of economics, commerce, politics, ideological manipulation or technology. Media is a

‘site of re-sacralization of contemporary cultures’. It is the locus where cultural identities

are created, communities are configured, and social actors constituted. Media offers a

possibility to people to meet and deal with the central questions of life. It offers a place

where people increasingly construct their meaning of life. Media offers ritual and

communitarian celebration. It articulates the integrating myths of society and provides

possibilities for identification (De Feijter, 2008).

In this same way, it is important to observe, for instance, Latin American

electronic church phenomenon. Unlike Latin American theorists such as the Brazilian

theologian Hugo Assmann who believed that the Latino expansion of electronic churches

constitutes an ideological project controlled by American televangelists, Martin-Barbero

contends that it is simply that some churches have used the media to project their

sermons to larger audiences or have used a variety of media and genres to reach many

new sectors of the public (Martin-Barbero, 1997). Rather, in my opinion, the significance

is that some churches have been able to transform radio and television into a new,

fundamental ‘mediation’ for the religious experience.

In the light of this picture of mediatized rituals it is possible to observe three

characteristics of religious mediatization. First, it is constructed on the base of the

interplay of multiple symbolic mediations (between global and local imageries, modern

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and traditional discourses, individual and institutional belonging, formal and informal

rituals, public and private spiritualities, sacred and secular world views). Here it is

possible to observe the coexistence of secularization and of re-sacralization.

Second, we can observe a kind of ‘eventization of religious practice’ because

these media rituals are characterized by main aspects of media events such as emphasis

(the omnipresence of the transmitted events), performativity (their constructing character,

creating active realities), loyalty (the acceptance of the definition of the event as proposed

by the organisers) and shared experience (construction and reconstruction of a ‘we’ in

their reception) (Hepp & Couldry, 2008).

Third, these mediatized religious rituals allow us to observe that media as a form

of ritual become a force of social integration by affirming a common set of values

(Couldry, 2003). In this sense, mediatized religious ritual works performatively to

energize, sustain and/or mobilize different collective sentiments and ‘social solidarities’–

many of which are structurally and discursively positioned in contention (Cottle, 2004).

Re-signification of Institutional Religious Authority

Another important aspect is related to the re-signification of religious institutions

that the mediatization process is producing in the Latin American context.

Publicly mediated sacred practices are shaping and re-signifying the religious

identity. This public emergence is spurring the development of new leaderships,

representations, and relationships beyond the boundaries of institutionalized religion.

Different kinds of negotiations and resistances are happening in the relationship between

religious public empowering and institutional religious authority.

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Mediated religion is constructing not only new forms and logics of religious

ritualization but also a new form for understanding and assuming religious authority as

well as a sense of institutional belonging. In the evangelical sector it is possible to

observe institutional reconfigurations whereby the logic of traditional religious

institutions is superseded by more flexible, secular and dynamic structures. These modern

religious movements and networks have become a more public presence through the

media. For instance, for the third consecutive year as part of Peru’s Independence Day

celebrations, the Peruvian President, the First Lady, his Ministers, the Chief of the

Military Political Command, members of Congress, mayors and civic leaders allied with

the government met on July 30 to celebrate a ‘Service of Thanksgiving for Perú’

characterized by some local media as an ‘Evangelical Te Deum.’ This liturgical event

was organized by a so-called ‘Thanksgiving Ministry’ composed of leaders of diverse

evangelical denominations.

In political terms, this event is significant in that it is a religious meeting that

breaks with the Independence Day tradition that had political leaders attending only a

Roman Catholic liturgy. For the President to participate in an evangelical liturgy could

be interpreted as a gesture that recognizes the religious plurality of Peruvian society. In

fact, behind this event one discovers many vested interests that must be analyzed to

discover their political, cultural and religious implications. The event planners acted as

individual leaders who have constituted an interdenominational network, rather than as

representatives of their respective traditional denominations. This is interesting because

the public religious empowerment experienced by these leaders demonstrates that

contemporary mediatized religion transcends traditional institutional legitimacy.

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Unlike in the past, the contemporary religious leaders do not necessarily derive

their legitimacy from the coverage provided by official religion, but from other factors,

including their capacity to engage in mediated discourse, their relationship with and

closeness to political power, the construction of a secularized image, their insertion into

the larger religious marketplace, and their elaboration of a moral discourse that promotes

personal ethics and that does not presuppose confrontation with political power.

These characteristics of the leaders that convened this ‘Evangelical Te Deum’

tend to confirm a contemporary global phenomenon: new types of leadership, new

representations and relationships are emerging beyond the spaces and boundaries

established by traditional religious institutions. They further indicate that traditional

religious institutions have begun to lose their capacity to regulate the beliefs and practices

of their members. The media-based religious leader finds his or her legitimacy not in the

authority derived from an institution, but rather in the ways that he or she appropriates

media spaces and networks or institutions that are connected to the public sphere.

Another important observation in countries such as Guatemala or Brazil is that the

neo-pentecostal evangelical sector has increased its cultural, social, and even political

power. Dennis Smith describes this phenomenon:

For centuries the churches had sufficient cultural power to force those of

other faith traditions to seek refuge in the institutional space provided by

the dominant churches. Witness, over the centuries, how Guatemalan

Mayans or Afro-Brazilians reached, in their particular contexts, strained

accommodations with Roman Catholicism. The dominant churches had

sufficient cultural power to suppress a wide range of alternative

spiritualities ranging from Spiritism to millenarian sects...With the

globalization of consumer culture and the consolidation of global

commercial media systems in the nineties, the cultural power of the

traditional churches began to wane. Sociologists in Latin America began

to speak of a global religious supermarket that competed with traditional

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religious institutions by eliminating the intermediary and directly offering

individual religious consumers a broad variety of symbolic goods. (Smith,

2005)

In both illustrations it is possible to observe religious mediatization creating a less

hierarchized form of power and authority. It corresponds to the more– in Weberian terms

– ‘charismatic’ authority which “…vests its power primarily in the individual who has a

special gift of grace or in related experiences and events deemed to be mysterious and

beyond rational comprehension (Wuthnow, 1994).

It confirms the global tendency that religious institutions in general began to lose

their authority and legitimacy, as many scholars have pointed out. Stewart Hoover

observed that the former loci of religious authority, in particular religious hierarchies and

denominations (but also local bodies), are now embedded in a marketplace of religious

choice (Hoover, 2006).

In this sense, the media not only presents or reports on religious issues; but also

changes the very ideas and authority of religious institutions and alters the ways in which

each deals with religious issues, as religion is increasingly being subsumed under the

logic media, both in terms of institutional regulation, symbolic content and individual

practices.(Hjarvard, 2008).

Religious Mediations and the Public Sphere

Several Latin American scholars (Martin-Barbero, Alfaro, Formen 2003; Avritzer

2002) have concluded that rather than employing the notion of a unified public sphere, it

is more productive to imagine a proliferation of publics, a contested terrain that ought to

be thought of in terms of its multiplicity of diversity. The principal question, then, is how

22

certain groups succeed in being seen not so much as in the public but rather as being the

public. A public defined in this way is always inherently unstable and needs to be

continuously reconstituted.

With the diminishing capacity of the nation-state to construct communities of

belonging, sub-publics and transnational publics that are grounded in religious

convictions, imaginaries, and networks have become increasingly important. Essential

for the emergence of these new publics has been the proliferation of new technologies of

communication and representation. Connecting this approach with religious practice,

Brigit Meyer (2006) contends that publics are not bounded entities but rather are involved

in continuous processes of construction and reconstruction, of negotiation and

contestation. Such contestations do not only refer to positions taken up with respect to

the secular versus the religious, but also refer also to a great variety of positions within an

emergent religious public. Following this public sphere’s approach, Nancy Fraser (1997)

proposes the existence of publics and counter-publics, ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ publics.

Without the existence of a public space where plurality is expressed, it will not be

possible to generate a democratic political culture.

For the Latin American context, the mediation of media is very important in the

process of configuration of the public sphere. Jesus Martin-Barbero (2006) and Rosa

Maria Alfaro (2006) contend that public opinion appears as the transformational sphere

executed in and by the media. For them, the media not only puts citizens in interaction

with the hermeneutic process, but also allows them to create their own political culture,

which moves between the real and the symbolic and between pragmatic reason and

23

desire. Mass media are a source of production of both their own cultural modernity and

the political morality which supports it.

An important study on evangelicals and politics in Peru in the 1990s found that

“evangelicals who supported the regime contributed neither to the articulation of

alternative spaces for participation in formal politics nor to the creation of a distinct

political ethos…The presence of evangelical movements presents a very different image”

(Lopez, 2004). It is important to mention that the emergence of non-Catholics such as

Evangelicals2 or Adventists constitutes part of the “pluralism and new presence of a

plurality of options [that] change the dynamics of religious growth and competition and

work in the subtle ways to reconfigure the relations between religion (ideas, practices,

institution) and the ordinary structures of power and identity in society” (Levine, 2006).

The democratic transition has generated new processes of the civic empowering

of non-Catholic groups. Together with a broad spectrum of groups (commonly referred

to as civil society), they have played a particularly prominent role in recent years. They

open public life to hitherto excluded groups and silent voices, and together represent the

creation of a series of spaces of public life which, in many instances, simply did not exist

previously (Levine, 2006).

This mediatized public religious practice is important to observe it beyond

political power interests or the power competition within institutional structures of

churches. Indeed, it is also important for an analysis of the configuration of the new

2 Since Catholicism is the official religion of Peru, evangelical churches and movements constitute a non-

official religious sector. For this reason, the public emergence of evangelism has resulted in a process of

social, cultural and political empowering. Nowadays, although Catholicism remains the only officially

recognized religion, evangelical churches are becoming more socially embedded and politically

legitimated.

24

symbolic representation and the resignification of religious discourse. In this sense, we

can observe at least three aspects of this mediatization.

First, these religious practices encourage a more complex view of interplay

between sacred forms of power’s administration and more secularized power elite. In

this sense it is possible to observe that “a variety of the boundaries that we have thought

to exist between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ broke down long ago, and are

increasingly problematic. All of this could be an effect of ‘the media,’ and thus evidence

of an overall, complex, and layered mediatization.” (Hoover, 2008)

Second, the public engagement of religious movements in Latin America, as

Hjarvard observes in the global context, may be considered a part of a gradual

secularization. Hjarvard contends that

… it is the historical process in which the media have taken over many of

the social functions that used to be performed by religious institutions….

Rituals, worship, mourning and celebration are all social activities that

used to belong to institutionalized religion but have now been taken over

by the media and transformed into more or less secular activities”

(Hjarvard, 2008).

Third, Most of the religious groups that have more fluidity with the public sphere

are part of the historically excluded social sector. In this sense, their appropriations of

media spaces, their participation in the spheres of state, and their construction of

relationships with influential public leaders constitute a way to obtain a place as visible

citizenship actors. Hence, media “can to contribute to the formation of plural solidarities

and publics” (Cottle, 2006)

This implies, as Martin-Barbero observes, that

…the media are not just economic phenomena or instruments of politics.

Nor are the media interesting simply as one more instance of rapid

technological change. Rather, the media must be analyzed as a process of

25

creating cultural identities and of bringing individuals into coherent

publics that are “subjects of actions” (Martin-Barbero, 1997).

From this perspective, mediation, as Silverstone stated, describes the

fundamental, but unevenly, dialectical process in which institutionalized media of

communication are involved in the general circulation of symbols in social life.

(Silverstone, 2002)

In summary, according to Latin America’s experience, modernity, as Anthony

Giddens contends, is more than an ‘out there’ phenomenon. It is equally an “in here”

phenomenon, and it always takes place in the local sphere. Hence, it affects existing

social roles and identities by rearranging social institutions and material conditions. In

this process, the places created by religious mediatization and other cultural mediation

constitute new languages, environments and discourses. At the same time, modernity

creates a context where religious practices are produced among complex, layered and

nuanced expressions. In this context, hegemonies and solidarities, reflexivity and

consumerism, dialogic or democratic culture and tribalism all coexist.

On the other hand, it is important to recognize that the Latin American urban

religious experience has undergone meaningful cultural changes and has became a real

space of intercultural negotiation and exchange, to the extent that those who form part of

these groups— with their mythological images, readings, symbols, and social practices—

are re-interpreting the world. The new ways of creating rituals produce a new religious

scene wherein sacredness has adopted new elements, which in turn create new meanings.

All this makes us realize that we are living in an era of boundless scenarios, as Néstor

García-Canclini asserts, where rather than mestizajes there are what he calls “hybrid

cultures” (García-Canclini, 2005). Specifically, the culture of modernity has given

26

believers new cultural imaginaries marked by a constant interaction of traditional rituals

with modern cultural codes, cultural memories and the circuits of communication.

The Latin American context reveals that religious mediatization has constituted an

important factor in understanding the complexity, layered and nuanced of contemporary

religiosity. Thus, in some cases, media are strengthening the re-sacralization process of

society, in others, they are re-signifying the authority of institutionalized religion. At the

same time, mediatized religiosity is fostering the modernization of traditional rituals,

creating new ways of experiencing a sense of community and belonging. In this context,

media rituals become an important factor of mediation in so far as they are performing

new imagined and actual collective identities.

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